Welcome back to our five-part series designed to upgrade your screenwriting game! We’ve dug into ways to level up your community and your technique. Now, we’ll break down a few ways to spike your creative juices.
As online writing classes taught by showrunners, consultants and gurus make screenwriting more accessible than ever to more people than ever, the quality of scripts going out to managers, competitions and execs continues to rise across the board. It’s no longer about having a great script. If you’re looking to break in, you’ve got to have the best script, the most memorable ideas, and the most exciting execution.
So how do you increase your ability to come up with new premises, more memorable ideas, and heightened concepts? Here are a few ways to boost your creativity.
1. INCREASE YOUR CREATIVE INPUT
Screenwriters are in the business of creating on demand. It’s hard enough to find inspiration on a schedule, but it becomes exponentially harder if you find yourself creating more than your time to get inspired. If all you do is write, eventually the life experience you’re drawing from can feel dull and outdated.
Make time to increase your creative input so that even if it’s not matching or exceeding your creative output, you at least have more balance than before.
Whether you choose to read books, create any kind of non-scripted art, take a life-skill class, or even just go for a walk or a roll outside, focus on being present with the art and world around you. It will inspire new ideas and add a freshness to your work when you go back to the page.
2. START A SPARK FILE
Most writers have a habit of keeping pen and paper handy for whenever an idea strikes them. Others email ideas to themselves, and others still may keep track of ideas on any spare piece of paper they can find.
Making sure you write your ideas down is a great first step to boost your creativity, but the follow-up is even more important and a Spark File will help you do that.
Defined by Steven Johnson, a Spark File is a master list in which you keep any and every idea you have. There’s no overarching organization to it, but that’s the beauty of it. By being a catch-all system, you’ll never have to wonder what random Word doc, Post-It note, or scrap of paper that “one great idea” you had was on. Instead, any character ideas you emailed to yourself or loglines you scribbled down get added to the ONE Spark File.
And building your Spark File is just the start. The next step is even more important. Once you have this list, it’s important to review and revise it. Find your favorite ideas and see what you can do to heighten the concepts. Copy the ones you want to work on into a new document in which you expand upon them, but keep the ever-growing Spark File going. When you know you have a reliable place to track your ideas, your subconscious may be more inclined to keep throwing out new ones, too!
4. GET TO KNOW YOUR VOICE
Scrolling through your Spark File is a great way to get a sense of your voice and to notice what kind of projects and themes you find yourself drawn to over and over again. Another way to better understand your voice is to study the way you write.
You can tell a lot about a person by how they decorate their home. The same goes for reading someone’s script. Is there a lot of white space or is it action-heavy? Do they use long, flowery sentences, or are they blunt and direct with descriptions? Check out this double-sided exercise that can help you notice the way Your Voice has already worked its way into your scripts.
Take a two-to-three-page scene from your script and write “the bad” version of it. I don’t mean make it unreadable. Just write the barest bones, simplified, boring version of that scene. Take out the adverbs and adjectives. Remove character descriptions. Reduce your dialogue lines to one sentence each.
Re-reading this new version of the scene should still get across the point of the original, but it’s missing everything that you brought to the table. Now take note of the things you took out. Sure, maybe some lines read cleaner now. But the elements you put back in because they make it better; the adjectives, the way you describe the world, the style of speech in each character’s original dialogue — that’s an element of Your Voice.
Take the same two-to-three-page scene you just worked with, and this time, instead of taking away, you’re going to add to it. Add 10 adjectives or swap out 10 words for more heightened words — more if you’re feeling fancy. Play up the words to match the genre you’re writing in. Drama? Sneak in “sullenly” or “sulked.” Comedy? Have someone “bounce” into the room “brightly.”
The most important part of this exercise is to recognize that this heightened and exaggerated version of your scene is not necessarily your new version. It likely reads a bit silly. But by turning your descriptive language up to eleven, you’ll be able to see where your instincts pull you, and where you’re having the most fun creatively. This “fun” is you tapping more clearly into Your Voice. You may even end up keeping a line or two in.
4. FLEX YOUR CREATIVE MUSCLES ON SMALLER PROJECTS
One last tip for boosting your creativity. Consider tackling a short-term creative commitment that uses bite-sized exercises to stir your creativity while providing easy, completable tasks that provide a daily jolt of accomplishment.
Lucky for you, we’ve got a month-long creative Bootcamp coming up starting on March 1st, so stay tuned, and keep tabs on the Final Draft Instagram for more details!
Happy Writing! And don’t forget to come back in two weeks to check out Part IV in this series in which we’ll upgrade your productivity!